Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/591

Rh from the sense of a name which can be common to several. The sense of a name, too, does not imply space and time relations, while these are always joined to a Vorstellung. We enquire now after the sense and denotation (Sinn and Bedeutung) of assertory clauses which contain a complete thought. The thought is the sense, not the denotation of such a proposition, and this latter must be found in its relation to reality. It is the striving towards truth which urges us onward from the sense of a proposition to what it denotes. One may be tempted to regard the relation of thought to truth as that of the subject to the predicate. But subject and predicate are in a logical sense portions of a thought, which is formed by their connection, but never in this way do we pass from a thought to reality. Subordinate clauses have generally no complete meaning attaching to them, and consequently do not denote objects. This arises either from the fact that in subordinate clauses the words have their indirect signification, or through the incompleteness of these clauses, which only express a thought when taken in conjunction with the rest of the proposition.

If we found that the value for knowledge of a = a and a = b differs greatly, this is explained by the fact that the sense of a proposition, i.e. the thought which it expresses, is not less important than its denotation. Although a and b both denote the same object, yet their sense can be different, and consequently the thought expressed in the proposition a = b different from that expressed in a = a. If we understand under judgment the advance from thought to its correspondence with truth, we can also say that the judgments are different.

While according to grammar every sentence must have subject and predicate, and according to logic in every judgment of a subject a predicate concept must be asserted or denied, there seems to be no subject in such expressions as es donnert, mir ist wohl, es ist Tag. Impersonals may be treated from two points of view, the psychologico-logical and the philologico-historical. The present article is devoted principally to a logical investigation of the subject. Traditional logic teaches that the judgment has two members. Some, however, (Brentano, Miklosich, Marty,) find the essence of the judgment in the act of recognition or rejection, and claim that this can as well take place with one concept as with two. When Miklosich says that in the sentence pluit the subject is not only not expressed but also not even thought, he is right, but only in so far as he is thinking of an efficient subject. Here, as in the case of all impersonals, there is a subject in the wider sense. Every